Disk drives are such commodity items that you might assume there’s no difference from manufacturer to another. But as a reader recently discovered, one point of distinction ... particularly if you buy a lot of them -- can be how long it takes to get the drive repaired under warranty. "Here is a small gripe that will affect our future disk purchasing," the reader wrote. "Disk drives fail. They are mechanical and Disk drives are such commodity items that you might assume there’s no difference from manufacturer to another. But as a reader recently discovered, one point of distinction … particularly if you buy a lot of them — can be how long it takes to get the drive repaired under warranty.“Here is a small gripe that will affect our future disk purchasing,” the reader wrote. “Disk drives fail. They are mechanical and getting cheaper and less reliable. I am not unhappy with the cost/capacity trade-off, and we take steps to protect our data. However, warranty handling does become more important as a purchase consideration as expected failure rates increase.”Inadvertently, the reader’s company recently put a few hard drive vendors through a warranty service comparison. “On the same day we recently happened to send back Seagate, Maxtor, and Toshiba drives for warranty repair. We received the Seagate drive in ten business days, the Maxtor in twelve days, and over a month later we still don’t have the Toshiba. I am very happy with both Seagate and Maxtor. The Maxtor repair was processed through the ‘Maxtor system’ even though Seagate now owns Maxtor.” Toshiba seemed to be almost purposely dragging its feet. “We previously had a long wait on a Toshiba disk and assumed it was an aberration,” the reader wrote. “Now it seems that it is policy. When called, the Toshiba repair center politely but firmly clings to ‘but you agreed to a thirty business day return policy when you filled out the RMA request’ and refuses to do anything to help. I hope to get the drive back in another week or two, but I am not holding my breath.”All the drives were low cost ATA models in the 40 to 160 GB range. “They aren’t mission critical, but a reasonable turnaround is appreciated,” the reader wrote. “It’s not as if any of them are actually ‘repairing’ these drives because we never get back the same serial number. So basically we have shipping, receiving, and handling time. They verify that it is bad but not abused, and send back a replacement. That’s what makes Toshiba’s current insistence on sitting on the drive for the entire 30 business day period irritating.”The reader just messaged me that he finally got the Toshiba drive about five and a half weeks after they sent it in. “Technically, they were within 30 days by their way of counting, since 30 business days equals six weeks,” the reader wrote. “I just got peeved because their ‘sitting on it’ is clearly a business decision. It’s their business, and they are entitled to their policy. Well, we’ve made ours, too. Given the price/performance equivalence in the competitive disk drive market, warranty service has become a deciding factor for our drive purchases. I just thought your readers might be interested in a data point on this.” Indeed. Do you have a data point about a vendor’s service policies that should be factored in before buying their product? If so, leave me a message in the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916 or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.Read and post comments about this story here. Technology Industry